Coroner: Human remains found in Rochester not Michelle Bianco

Thursday

Jul 24, 2014 at 5:09 PMJul 24, 2014 at 10:28 PM

By Jason NevelStaff Writer

The skeletal remains found in Rochester last week are not those of a 43-year-old former Springfield woman who has been missing for the past six years, the Sangamon County coroner’s office said Thursday.

Michelle Bianco was last heard from about 7:30 p.m. April 5, 2008. That’s when she called her boyfriend and told him she was going to call her son for a ride home from her cousin’s house near Wheeler and South Grand avenues.

A resident who was cleaning a shed Saturday in the backyard of a property at 309 Park St. in Rochester found human remains. The remains, described by authorities as those of a 30- to- 40-year-old white female, had been in the shed for years.

The discovery sparked speculation citywide that it might be the body of Bianco.

Dental records

Coroner Cinda Edwards said Thursday that her office was able to rule out Bianco through an examination of dental records.

Edwards said the coroner’s office is still working on making identification through the dental records of other missing people. DNA results from the Illinois State Police crime lab will not be available for several weeks, she added.

“DNA is always nice to have to back that up, but you can say with a pretty high degree of certainty with dental records,” Edwards said.

The coroner’s office has ruled the death is “likely consistent with a homicide” based off the fact that items were stacked on top of the body in the shed, Edwards said.

State police said the Rochester resident who discovered the remains is not a person of interest in the investigation.

In addition, several items were collected as evidence and will be processed by the state police forensic laboratory. It could take several weeks to get those results as well.

Rochester Police Chief Bill Marass said earlier this week that there are no known active missing person cases in Rochester.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons Systems lists 86 missing women in Illinois, including several women from Peoria and Champaign.

Similar situation

Determining the identity of a body is something the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office is familiar with, although it didn’t have the luxury of dental records.

The sheriff’s office was in charge of investigating a headless, handless and footless torso that two men discovered in October 2012 while walking in a wooded area off a rural Mechanicsburg road.

Undersheriff Jack Campbell said, in that case, the sheriff’s office had no witnesses to interview and relied on DNA to determine it was the remains of Norman Raymel McCaster, a Springfield transplant who lived with his wife, Juatasha Denton-McCaster, in a bungalow off North Grand Avenue.

Denton-McCaster was arrested in November 2012 and convicted this spring of murder and dismemberment. She was sentenced in June to 78 years in prison.

That’s a different situation than Illinois State Police are dealing with, Campbell said, because when a body is found in a residential area, authorities can interview people at the house where it was discovered, family members and neighbors.

However, Campbell said it’s hard to say how helpful that will be in this case due to the length of time the body had been in the shed.

Campbell said the fact that Norman McCaster was a member of the Illinois National Guard was crucial to determining his identity. The military keeps a database of DNA the sheriff’s office used to get a match.

Authorities can also try to match someone’s genetic information in a database of convicted criminals, he added.

But even if authorities don’t get a match on the DNA, they can continue to review missing-person cases and monitor new reports. State police reached out to the sheriff’s office about the Bianco case, Campbell said.

If a new report of a missing person surfaces, he said, police can cross-check DNA with that of a family member.

Through dogged police work, Campbell said, the investigation that starts with the mystery associated with the discovery of human remains comes into focus.

“It would have been difficult for us for a while to determine an identity, but we would have found out eventually,” Campbell said.

***

One year later, previous homicide remains unsolved

It has been a year since a 78-year-old Rochester woman was found dead at her home on Willimantic Drive in the Oak Hills Estates subdivision on Rochester’s southwest side, but police are still actively investigating the apparent homicide.

Police and paramedics were called to the home of Norma Lipskis, the former owner of the Petticoat Junction Restaurant in the Rochester Station, about 9:30 p.m. July 25 and initially believed she’d died from injuries suffered during a fall. But an autopsy conducted a few days later determined her injuries were “consistent with a homicide.”

“It’s still an open case,” said Rochester Police Chief Bill Marass, who said last summer that Lipskis’ death was the first homicide in the village during his more than 30 years with the department.

Marass said there is “no suspected connection” between Lipskis’ killing and the skeletal remains that were found Saturday in shed behind the home at 309 Park St.

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